Northcliffe launches topic pages for regional news sites

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ThisisBristol.co.uk has become the first of Northcliffe Media's local news sites to launch topic pages. Articles on the site will now include inline links from key words , such as places, names and issues, to a web page gathering stories, relevant information and multimedia linked to that topic.

The pages are created using a process called data-mining, which uses technology from OpenCalais and Nstein to analyse stories semantically and suggest subjects for topic pages, Robert Hardie, content strategy director at Northcliffe, told Journalism.co.uk.

"We've already been data-mining our archive and automatically data-mine every live story as part of the normal publishing cycle," he said.

"Once a topic is mentioned more than three times a topic page is created for that topic and an email alerts the site publisher. They can then decide to unpublish the page if they don't want it; allow it to stand unenhanced or gather the extra images, video and static content for it.

"We're starting the enhancement process with the most popular topic pages."

The sites with topic pages will have to carefully monitor the level of sensitivity employed by the semantic technologies so that users are not bombarded with links from every word, said Hardie.

The pages will be live tested for two weeks on the Bristol site before being launched on the rest of the thisis network.

The pages will help also help to guide users to Northcliffe's websites as they are 'brilliantly indexable' via Google, added Hardie.